Never Be Bored
10 February 2019
All Superheroes Need Therapy
Worm webserial by Wildbow. Watchmen comic book by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Iron Man 3 2013 Shane Black film, Jessica Jones television series.
Worm is a story that explodes in scale, and I love it for that. It begins as the story of one girl, Taylor, living with her dad in a city on the east coast, who gets powers, joins a gang of four other powered individuals, and tries to balance school with masked life. It ends 1.6 million words later, having expanded to include literally hundreds of characters all around the world.
The work put into each character is incredible. At the end of each arc is an interlude—one chapter following some character other than Taylor, sometimes a flashback or seemingly unrelated scene. These are some of my favorite chapters out of the whole thing—I'm such a sucker for extensive world building and background development, and I adore Wildbow's ability to take some character I didn't care much about, and a couple thousand words later I either absolutely love them or hate them.
Worm is also featured in The R. Smith Edition.
If you liked the darker and grittier parts of Worm, the moral ambiguity and the dramatics of dealing with people who dress up in costume and work outside the law, then you might like Watchmen. It's a comic made out of pure love for the comic book genre, intricate and gorgeous and so well written. (The movie is currently on Netflix, but the book is better.)
Tony Stark is my favorite of the Avenger squad (Worm's Parahuman Response Team would probably put him at a mid level Tinker) and by the time Iron Man 3 rolls around, he really needs a break. More, I think, than other films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you get to see the aftermath of all the crazy stuff that happens to the Avengers and company.
There's a couple of characters in Worm who don't want to be heros, didn't want powers, but now they're stuck with them and they have to live with all their baggage on top of superhuman abilities. If you liked those characters then you might like Jessica Jones, a Marvel TV show on Netflix, about a private detective with super strength and a strong desire to be left alone with massive quantities of whiskey, thank you very much.